Wednesday, October 3, 2012

I have no
idea how much lobster costs in UK but like everything there, I guess
it is pretty expensive and not everyone has the opportunity save a few pennies
by going out and catching a pot full every time they need some.In Luanda, whole lobster sells for about $15
a kilo which strikes me as pretty bloody eye-watering if all you’re going to
eat is the tail, which is all most people seem to want.Our lobsters here are crayfish really, as they
do not have claws but everyone calls them lobster.

I do like
lobster; simply done in boiling water then chopped up into a salad or
butterflied and then grilled with plenty of butter.I especially like it, however, when made as a
curry.

This curry
is relatively quick and easy to make and uses easy to find ingredients, many of
them (shock, horror!) in tins.

First, get
yourself a few lobsters…

That should be enough to start with...

Fill a big
pan up with very slightly salted water, add chopped fresh coriander stems and
bring it up to the boil.

Some people
are squeamish about giving lobster a final very hot bath so if you are one of
them, buy frozen lobster and leave the guilt to someone else.If you have live ones, you can always pop
them in the freezer for a while which numbs them.The trick is not to overload the pot, if you
do the temperature of the water falls rapidly and this not only spoils the
flesh, it could lead to the appetite busting sight of a lobster thrashing
about screaming for Radox bath salts.

While you
are busy dropping lobsters in a pot and fishing them out once they are pink
(five minutes or so) finely chop up a few onions (one small one per
lobster) and fry them off in some oil in a heavy based pan until they are
translucent, not brown.

Add a
generous table spoon of Garam Masala and stir that in before adding a couple of
tins of skinned tomatoes and mash them around to pulp them up a bit.By now the lobsters should all have been
boiled so take a couple of cups of the water and pour that into the
onion/tomato mix and give it a stir.Keep an eye on it so it does not burn adding a little more lobster water
as required.At this stage I usually add
chopped fresh pineapple but this is entirely optional.If you want your curry spicy though, this is
the time to add fresh or dried chilli.I
have a four year old who shouldn’t really eat spicy food so even though I like
my curries with a heat rating of ‘Burning Bum By Morning’, I have to make do
with mild for the time being.

Cooking with Gas! Steaming nicely. Note the shitty little stove I survive with at the moment

This is what the sauce should look like with the addition of a little of the water in which the lobsters were boiled

Rip the
tails off the lobsters and split them open straight down the back.Peel out the flesh and remove the vein.Throw the heads back into the boiling
water.Chop up the lobster tails into
bite sized chunks and put them to one side.

Five lobster tails, a pot of Coconut milk, a wooden cutting board and a sharp knife. What else can I say about this photo?

Lobster bodies thrown back into the water to make a lovely stock

At this
stage I usually pause to choke down a cigarette and moisten my tonsils with
amber nectar to give time for all the flavour from the lobster bodies to
infuse.

Ladle out
about a litre of the infused lobster water into the onion/tomato mix and give
the mixture a stir to incorporate it.This
now needs to reduce which will allow further time for salad preparation,
another quick shmoke and a slug of something nice.Put a litre of fresh, very slightly salted water
into a pan and set that on the heat.This will be for the rice.

Little Alex just can't resist testing the reduction. He is my finest critic (out of the mouths of babes and all that), and he is certainly not verbose limiting his reviews to just 'YUCK!' or, 'MMM. NICE DADDY!'. Today I was a nice Daddy.

Very finely
chop an onion and a couple of garlic cloves and sweat them off with a bay leaf in a
few tablespoons of oil in a heavy based pan (one that has a lid).When the onions are soft, add two mug fulls
of rice and stir the rice around so it does not stick.You want to coat all the rice grains with
oil.Then add the boiling water and give
the rice one more gentle stir to ensure nothing is stuck to the bottom of the
pan.Allow the rice to come to the boil,
turn the heat down low and put the lid on the pan.

By now the
onion tomato mix should be reducing nicely.It needs to reduce until you can draw a path through it with a wooden
spoon so that the bottom of the pan is briefly exposed.The mixture should be loose but not
liquid.

Doesn't take long to reduce so keep an eye on it. If you burn it, you have to go straight to jail, not pass Go and not collect 200 Quid...

Add the
chopped lobster, chopped fresh coriander leaves, stir it up and then add half a
can of coconut cream.Allow this to come
to a simmer on a low heat, check seasoning. You shouldn't really need salt
as there was salt in the lobster water (unless you are cooking for Angolans who consume enough salt with every meal to preserve a ham) then bung the lid on and turn the heat
off.

Note, we
haven’t bothered to even check the rice, let alone stir it. Have a look at the
pan, if there is still lots of steam escaping out from under the lid, there is
still water in there.When the steam
output starts to reduce (about ten minutes after first pouring the boiling water
in) lift the lid off the rice pan.What
we want to see is no water, instead little craters in the rice surface where
the water has boiled through.If the pan
is still steaming slightly, it will not have burnt.Turn the heat off, leave the lid on the pan
and relax for ten minutes (or lay the table if the Maidling is already off duty).

Garnish the
curry with a little more fresh coriander and serve.

Some decent sized (20-25 Kg) Kingfish we caught earlier. I'll get round to doing some nice recipes with these later. Honest!

While I was rattling the pans, the monkeys were hooting at each other in the jungle not 50 yards from the kitchen door. Must have been the smell of the cooking. Sorry for the quality of the photo, it was taken with the camera on my phone which, apart from a ladle, was all I had to hand. Do not expect any Monkey recipes from me by the way...

In the meantime I have kept myself, and a few willing helpers, busy laying 196 square metres of tiles in the restaurant area as well as surrounding the same with the double wall that will form the beds for my herbs and flowers.

STILL a bloody building site but there is progress

Looks bigger now that it has been tiled. That and only having one table. Sorry about the uncleared mess on it, I had to feed the troops and the maidling was still foraging for scraps when I took this photo. I shall bend her over the table and give her a stiff talking to in the morning.

Links

The recipes...

I grew up in the Black Forest, just across the border from France. My mother and most of my immediate family were German. I then married an English Cordon Bleu qualified chef. Until she ran off with a married gas bottle filler from Aga Gas, I had enjoyed the finest cuisine all my life. Suddenly, I found myself eating the most inedible self made slops or, on the rare occasions I found myself anywhere remotely civilised, driving miles to find a decent restaurant.

Once I started humanitarian mine clearance, and then strayed into the security business in Africa, my diet was often reduced to just dried fish and pulses. The lean diet, aided by the effects of persistent malaria, reduced my weight from 80 to 57kgs.

So, I decided that if I wanted to eat well, and avoid having to buy a complete new wardrobe, I had better teach myself to cook. Easier said than done when in a war zone. It is all very well getting the best cook books but all of them assume that the local delicatessen or well stocked supermarket is but a short drive away. So I stopped lugging the books around in my back-pack and started to look at the ingredients that were available around me. I then figured out the best way to turn, what were sometimes collectively quite an odd assortment, into a dish that would not only sustain me, but was a delight to eat. Well I wasn't always successful, my rats in Satay sauce were, quite frankly, gut churning but I was desperate at the time.

To my surprise, however, I found that cooking in the front line, so to speak, was an enjoyable experience. It took my mind off the horrors around me and the discomfort we all suffered. It brought me close to a surprising variety of people and I am sure that on more than one occasion, instead of being ambushed, the smell of cooking wafting through the bush encouraged my would be assailants to appear sheepishly out of the gloom, weapons pointing safely towards the ground, politely asking if there was any going spare.

What made cooking a joy for me was when I stopped slavishly following recipes and started to create using the ingredients that I could find. It means that many of my recipes vary significantly from traditional methods. All I can say is that all my dishes have been field tested, sometimes under fire.

The better recipes, the ones that my crew asked me to make time and time again, I have included here along with a few anecdotes about the place I happened to be when I first had a go at the dish. You, of course, should feel completely at liberty to modify away to your heart and palate's desire

About Me

I first came to Africa in the early 90's, supposedly for one year. Six months in Mozambique followed by six months in Angola and then home again. Over 20 years later, I am still here.
I have gone where the jobs were, in mine clearance, security, the oil industry, anything that would put bread on the table. I have a farm in southern Angola and am building a lovely restaurant and hotel on the banks of the Rio Kwanza where the river spills into the Atlantic ocean. I am 55 years old, have two sons aged 16 and 6, a longtime girlfriend 21 years my junior, three dogs and a fine goose which we keep meaning to eat at Christmas but somehow never do.